18 February 2014 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites Mobile
World Congress attendees to attend workshops on the new OGC GeoPackage Service
Interface Standard, the candidate OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard, and the
candidate OGC Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML2) Encoding Standard.
Attendees at this free event will also see a demonstration of ARML2 being used
to enable interoperability among leading Augmented Reality platform providers
Layar, Metaio and Wikitude. The demo and
workshops will be held in the afternoon after the morning presentations on
"OGC Location Standards for a Mobile World" by representatives from OGC, OMA (Open Mobile Alliance), W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and the Small Cell
Forum. More information and to register, visit http://www.myogc.org/go/mobile2014

The day's events will be held from 0900 to 1500 on 25 February
2014 in Barcelona, Spain at the Institut
Cartogràfic I Geològic de Catalunya (ICGC), formerly the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya (ICC)(see map),during the Mobile World Congress. The Mobile
World Congress, running 24-27 February 2014 in Barcelona, is the world's largest exhibition,
conference and networking event for mobile operators, cell phone and device
manufacturers, and providers of mobile software.

Beginning
tomorrow, the candidate OGC IndoorGML Encoding Standard will be in its final 30-day public comment
period before its adoption vote by members of the OGC. It has been developed to provide a common schema framework for
interoperability between indoor navigation applications. These cover a wide
spectrum of application areas such as indoor location services, indoor web map
services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped
persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics.

In
addition to these presentations about location standards that maximize the value
of mobile devices' location awareness, the OGC will host the world’s first Augmented
Reality (AR) Browser Interoperability Demonstration. Layar, Metaio and Wikitude,
the largest AR platform providers, have cooperated to make it easy for AR
content to be shared across their technology platforms. This cooperation has resulted in the development of three
unreleased but fully functioning browsers from the three companies. The common AR interchange format that enables this
AR interoperability is based on the candidate OGC ARML 2.0 Encoding Standard
that Martin Lechner of Wikitude introduced into the OGC. ARML is expected to
come to an adoption vote within OGC in the next couple of months.

Attendees
will have an opportunity to meet developers familiar with these three standards
and discuss the opportunities that arise from standards-based integration on
mobile devices of spatial data and services.

George Percivall, Chief
Engineer, OGC, said, "This event marks an important milestone in progress of
open standards for spatial data and location services becoming easy to
implement on mobile devices for a very wide variety of applications. Smart
Cities require a convergence of spatially enabled information to improve the
efficiency, equity and quality of urban living. The data will come from many
sources and be used for many purposes. Come to ICC next Tuesday and talk
to OGC about GeoPackage, IndoorGML, ARML and our plans for a Smart Cities
Testbed."

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
is an international consortium of more than 470 companies, government agencies,
research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process
to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support
interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and
location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology
developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful
with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC
website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.